The Europeans

Epilogue

‘The rest of my life will be without happiness,’ Pauline wrote to Ludwig Pietsch on the death of Turgenev. ‘I will abandon myself to the bitter joy of memories.’ She was in a desperate state, according to Louise, who explained this by the death of her father, omitting any mention of her mother’s other loss. Pauline tried to kill herself by jumping from a window. For several weeks her children kept her under watch and put a lock on the windows. She said her life was now over (she was sixty-two), that what remained of it was no more than an epilogue.¹

Pauline lived for another twenty-seven years. She led a full and busy life. In 1884, she sold the house in the rue de Douai and moved into an apartment near the National Assembly, at 243 boulevard Saint Germain, which she filled with the antique furniture and ornaments she had collected all her life.* The top-floor flat was light and spacious with a marvellous view across the place de la Concorde towards the Champs-Elysées.

Pauline’s singing days were long over but she continued to compose, mainly for her own amusement and the pleasure of her friends, although some works, notably Le Rêve de Jésus (1892), a music drama, were publicly performed.² She also went on teaching until the end of her life. Among the hundreds of pupils she had taught were the great contralto Marianne Brandt (1842–1921), celebrated for her interpretation of Wagnerian roles; the French contralto Jeanne Gerville-Riache (1882–1915), who in her short but brilliant career sang the part of Geneviève in the first performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902); the Hungarian soprano Aglaja Orgeni (1841–1926), who after a long career of singing mainly in Italian opera became a renowned teacher at the Dresden Royal Conservatory; and the soprano Margarethe Siems (1879–1952), a student of Orgeni as well as of Viardot, who was best known for her creation of three leading roles in the first performances of three operas by Richard Strauss: Chrysothemis in Elektra (1909), the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier (1911) and Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos (1912).

Pauline Viardot on her balcony in Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris, c. 1900.

Pauline’s apartment was an active centre of music life in Paris. She kept up her tradition of hosting concerts on Thursday evenings where her pupils could perform. Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Franck, Chabrier and Delibes were regular visitors. In 1886, Saint-Saëns arranged for an ensemble of his friends to give a private concert of Le Carnaval des animaux for Liszt, then with just a few months left to live, who made a rare appearance at Pauline’s house. The next year, a visitor from Norway, Edvard Grieg, played an arrangement of his Piano Concerto. It was the first time the piece was performed in France.

Tchaikovsky also visited. He had been aware of Pauline’s role as a promoter of his works in France since the 1870s, but it was not until his stay in Paris in the summer of 1886 that he finally decided to call on her. He appeared on 12 June with the cellist Anatoly Brandukov. Caught in a storm on their way, they arrived drenched, but, as Tchaikovsky noted in his diary, ‘the circumstances made it easier for us to become acquainted’. He was enchanted by the ‘little mother [mamasha] Viardot’, as he described her in a letter to his brother: ‘during the three hours I spent at her house I must have kissed her hand about a dozen times.’ She was ‘such a wonderful and interesting woman’, he reported to his sister-in-law. ‘In spite of her seventy years, she comes across as a woman of forty. She is so full of energy, takes an interest in everything, knows about everything, and is extremely kind,’ he enthused. Tchaikovsky was excited to have seen the Don Giovanni manuscript, which Pauline kept in its presentation box on a table in her living room (in 1892 she donated the score to the Paris Conservatory). Tchaikovsky noted in his diary: ‘Saw the orchestra score of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, written IN HIS OWN HAND ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !’ The composer was enthralled by Pauline’s talk of Turgenev, a writer he had always loved but never met. Asked by his patron Nadezhda von Meck whether Pauline recalled Turgenev, Tchaikovsky replied: ‘I can assure you that not only does she remember him, but we spent almost all the time talking about him, and she told me in detail how together they wrote [the story] The Song of Triumphant Love.’ Shortly afterwards, Tchaikovsky read the story and made some sketches for a vocal composition based on it, though he never completed the work.³

There was a steady stream of visitors from Russia. They wanted information about Turgenev, asked for his possessions, wanted interviews about his private life. For them Pauline was important only as the ‘mistress’ of ‘their’ writer. The Russians were hostile to Pauline, despite her considerable efforts to promote Russian music in Europe (which she would continue long after Turgenev’s death) and her generous decision to return to Russia a number of his possessions – including a case and ring that had belonged to Pushkin and Kharlamov’s portrait of Turgenev – which he had bequeathed to her.⁴ They accused her of depriving Russia of its great writer, of corrupting him by keeping him in Europe through her malign influence. Even Russians in Paris who had once been her friends would turn against Viardot. Among them was Lopatin, who had set up the Russian Reading Room with Turgenev and been many times in Pauline’s house, where she gave concerts to raise funds for them. ‘For the Russians,’ Lopatin later claimed, ‘there is a marked difference between Turgenev’s works before he met her and those afterwards. Before they contained the people – after they did not. She took the Russian out of him.’⁵

Bogoliubov was one of the few Russians to defend Pauline. Writing on Turgenev’s death, he reminded his compatriots that it was she, not they, who had sat by his bed during the last months of his terrible illness, and warned that they were not to judge: ‘Turgenev and Viardot did not lead the lives of ordinary people. They were united by their spiritual qualities … in ways that are not our business.’ As one might expect, Pauline was spirited in her own defence. She told Bogoliubov:

By what right do the so-called friends of Turgenev take it on themselves to condemn him and me for our relationship? Every person is born free, and their actions, provided they do not cause harm, are not subject to the judgement of anybody else. Our feelings and actions were based on rules accepted by ourselves, not understood by the crowd, nor indeed by many people considered by themselves to be decent and intelligent … We understood each other much too well to care what other people said of us, for those who really knew and loved us both recognized the rules that bound us.⁶

Part of this resentment of Pauline was based on the assumption that she was the sole inheritor of Turgenev’s property and literary estate, thus depriving Russia of its due. The idea went back to the writer’s final illness, when he had made an amendment to his will bequeathing his property in France and his literary earnings to Pauline. Reports circulated in Russia that Viardot had made him change his will, that she was keeping him a prisoner in France so that she could further pressure him to sell his lands at Spasskoe and leave her the cash from those as well. The rumour gained in currency as old friends of Turgenev complained on his death that they had not been left anything: the writer Polonsky made a fuss on this account, claming that his wife had been held in affection by Turgenev but forgotten in his will.

In fact the situation was confused. Never good with money or practical matters, Turgenev had left his affairs in a mess. The amendment leaving Pauline his literary rights was negated by his deal with Glazunov which had sold them to the publisher for fifty years. Adding to this inconsistency, a year before his death Turgenev had given full control of his literary estate to Annenkov. There were, moreover, different wills, one in French and one in Russian, which said different things about his literary property (Turgenev had forgotten to destroy the first when he made the second will). As for his landed property, there was no more clarity. One of the wills had seemingly bequeathed his estates in Russia to his daughter Paulinette. Although she had fled her violent husband in 1882, she now returned to Gaston to support her claim in the French courts, where he represented her. But Pauline also had a claim to Spasskoe. She had kept a legal document from 1864 showing that Turgenev still owed her 30,000 roubles (120,000 francs) – the loan he had received from the Viardots that year to buy his plot of land in Baden and pay for his daughter’s dowry. The debt was set against his property at Spasskoe, worth around 165,000 roubles at the time of Turgenev’s death. It is inconceivable that Turgenev had not repaid this debt (the sale of his house to the Viardots in 1868 would have been the obvious time to cancel it). The retention of this bill of debt – which should have been annulled when Turgenev repaid the 30,000 roubles – would thus suggest that he had wanted Pauline to keep it as protection of her claim to Spasskoe, or at least a part of it.

Under Russian law Turgenev had no right to leave his land to Viardot: ancestral estates like Spasskoe were not subject to wills and could not be given away if there was a legally recognized family member to inherit it. Apart from Gaston’s claim on Paulinette’s behalf, which was rejected by the Russian courts, a case was made by two distant cousins of Turgenev on his mother’s side, Kleopatra Sukhotina and Olga Galakhova, both from Orel, who had never met the writer (Turgenev had not even been aware of their existence). After years of legal argument, much of it conducted through the Russian consulate in Paris, the matter was finally resolved in 1887 when the Orel District Court awarded Spasskoe to Sukhotina and Galakhova but ordered them to repay Turgenev’s debt to Viardot, who accepted the sum of 46,020 roubles (184,000 francs), allowing for interest, in renunciation of her claim based on the bill of debt from 1864. Turgenev left a generous gift to each one of Pauline’s four children (Paul was left the Stradivarius violin), but his own daughter and grandchildren received nothing from his will.⁷

On 30 September 1883, the Berliner Tageblatt published its obituary of Turgenev. ‘For twenty years now we Germans have become more accustomed to regard Turgenev as one of our own,’ wrote the literary critic Bruno Steuben. ‘In no other country have his works been so often translated, eagerly read, admired as enthusiastically as in ours.’ Over the next thirty years, however, Turgenev’s international standing as a writer went into a slow decline. In 1914, Thomas Mann complained that the Russian novelist had been unfairly disregarded for too long. He himself adored his works and read them many times throughout his life. In 1949, he said that, if he was banished to a desert island, Fathers and Sons would be among the six books he would take.⁸

The waning of Turgenev’s popularity was largely due to the rise of other Russian writers, such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose works appeared in translation with increasing frequency after 1886. The publication in that year of de Vogüé’s bestselling survey of Russian literature, Le Roman russe, which soon appeared in many languages, led to something of a ‘Russian craze’ across Europe and America. Publishers responded by bringing out translations, which were cheap to publish because Russian writers remained unprotected by the Berne Convention on international copyright. In France the number of Russian novels published in translation averaged around two a year in the early 1880s, but soared to a peak of twenty-five in 1888. In the United States, twenty-seven different editions of Tolstoy’s works were published in 1889 alone.⁹

Until then, Turgenev had been by far the best-known Russian writer in the West. His elegant prose style had previously fixed the boundaries of ‘Russianness’. The discovery of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy – seemingly more ‘Russian’ than the Europeanized Turgenev – altered Western expectations of Russian literature. Now their readers in the West wanted Russian writers to be roughly primitive and spiritual, motivated by the big ideas about human existence, exotically original, to write at greater length – in sum, unlike anything in the rest of European literature. The change in attitudes could be abrupt. On 7 October 1887, Goncourt wrote in his diary of his late friend:

Turgenev – it is incontestable – was an outstanding conversationalist but as a writer he was overestimated … Yes, he was a remarkable landscapist, could describe hunting in the woods like no one else, but he was a minor painter of humanity, lacking grandeur of vision. In effect, there was an absence in his work of the primitive roughness [rudesse primitive] of his country, the roughness of old Moscow, of the Cossacks, and in his books his own countrymen seem to me to have the air of Russians painted by a Russian who could have spent his whole existence at the court of Louis XIV.¹⁰

Despite his declining readership, Turgenev remained a major influence on European and American writers, perhaps more so than any other Russian, with the possible exception of Chekhov. He cast his subtle spell on writers as diverse as Thomas Mann, Guy de Maupassant, John Goldsworthy, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and, above all, Henry James, who read him all his life, loved him as a man, and shared his basic attitudes to literature and life. ‘Turgenev is in a peculiar degree what I may call the novelist’s novelist,’ James wrote in The House of Fiction, ‘an artistic influence extraordinarily valuable, and ineradicably established.’¹¹

The ‘invasion’ of the Russians, as the flood of translated Russian novels became known, was soon followed by the coming of the Scandinavians (Ibsen, Bjørnson and Strindberg), whose dramas played in theatres across Europe during the 1890s. This was the highpoint of literary cosmopolitanism on the European continent.

There was a widening range of literatures that came to be translated into English, French and German, the dominant literary languages. Books in Polish, Italian and Spanish broke into the European market alongside those translated from the Russian and Scandinavian languages, and an ever larger number of translations ran in periodicals, which appeared in astonishing profusion at the turn of the twentieth century.

The influx of foreign books led in many countries to protests by those who feared that it would undermine the distinctive nature of their domestic literatures. Such concerns had long been voiced by critics who assigned the highest literary value to national character. As early as 1846, Saint-René Taillandier had warned in the Revue des deux mondes that the growing number of foreign translations risked creating uniformity between the literatures of separate countries. As the book trade became internationalized, nationalist defenders of individual literary languages and traditions grew in strength. Across Europe, from the 1870s, they expressed their growing opposition to the cosmopolitanism that had defined European culture from the early decades of the nineteenth century. This reaction fuelled the growth of political nationalism on the European continent, a development that led to the outbreak of the First World War.

Anti-cosmopolitanism was particularly strong in France, where the Dreyfus scandal* was indicative of a growing anti-Semitism in the French Catholic establishment. ‘We have really been invaded, and from every side at once,’ wrote Henry Bordeaux, a Catholic traditionalist, lawyer and writer, in Le Correspondant in 1901. ‘If we do not keep our guard, soon there will be no French literature.’¹² Similar reactions could be found across the continent. The opening of countries to international currents was accompanied in most of them by a reactive nationalism in the arts and politics.

The issue was most acute in literature, the carrier of the national language and ideas. This was where defenders of tradition made their stand against the universal avant-garde. In the visual arts, where by the end of the century an Impressionist aesthetic had become assimilated into national traditions across Europe, there was a stronger tendency to regard the emergence of this international idiom as a positive development. As André Hallays put it in 1895, for the first time in history a genuinely European style of art was beginning to emerge:

It is not only writers who are converging into a European school; even more than them, artists are accelerating the advance of cosmopolitanism. Already now it is practically impossible to class painters by national schools. A few months ago, visiting the Munich galleries, I was struck by how far the nomadic spirit of the painters, the accidents of their artistic formation, and their conformity to the same aesthetic, most often literary, made it hard to tell where they came from. Their styles are so scrambled and confused that an art critic, even well-informed, would always hesitate and often be mistaken in attributing the paintings: there are Italians painting in the English way; Scandinavians who could be taken for southern Italians.¹³

It was at this point that the idea of a ‘European culture’ – as a synthesis of artistic styles and works from across the continent and as an identity based on common values and ideas – began to emerge in the discourse. The term itself was seldom used before this time. People rarely spoke of a ‘European culture’ in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. They spoke most commonly of ‘European Civilization’, a Eurocentric term inherited from the Enlightenment, by which they meant Western reason, liberty, the classical artistic heritage and science, held up as universal values on which human progress was founded. This was a European ideology but not itself a marker of a distinct European cultural identity. You could believe in it wherever you came from.

Notions of Europe as a cultural space – shared by ‘Europeans’ and uniting them – first appeared in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Saint-Simon conceived of Europe as having a ‘civilizing mission’ defined by its secular spirit, in which the arts would take the place of religion, race or nation in uniting peoples on the Continent.¹⁴ Goethe thought that a hybrid type of European culture would be formed through the growth of cultural traffic and exchange between nations. But it was only in the final quarter of the century that such ideas gave way to the notion of a distinct European sensibility, or cultural identity: a sense of ‘Europeanness’ shared by Europe’s citizens regardless of their nationality.

Nietzsche was a pioneer of this notion. In Human, All Too Human (1878) he presented the idea that European nations would be weakened, and one day extinguished, by international ‘trade and industry’, and that the ‘circulation of books and letters’ would bring about a ‘common high culture’. As a result of ‘this unceasing hybridization’, Nietzsche argued, a ‘mixed breed’ would emerge, that of ‘European man’. An enemy of nationalism, which he called the ‘sickness of the century’, Nietzsche advanced his ideal of ‘the good European’ – the ‘homeless’ citizen of Europe – as an antidote to it. In his view, Homo Europaeus was already being formed:

Whether that which now distinguishes the European be called ‘civilization’ or ‘humanization’ or ‘progress’; whether one calls it simply, without implying any praise or blame, the democratic movement in Europe: behind all the moral and political foregrounds indicated by such formulas a great physiological process is taking place and gathering greater and ever greater impetus – the process of the assimilation of all Europeans, their growing detachment from the conditions under which races dependent on climate and class originate, their increasing independence of any definite milieu which, through making the same demands for centuries, would like to inscribe itself on soul and body – that is to say, the slow emergence of an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of man which, physiologically speaking, possesses as its typical distinction a maximum of the art and power of adaptation. This process of becoming European, the tempo of which can be retarded by … the still-raging storm and stress of ‘national feeling’ … will probably lead to results which its naive propagators and panegyrists, the apostles of ‘modern ideas’, would be least inclined to anticipate [emphasis as in original].¹⁵

The arts played a central role in this evolving concept of a European cultural identity. More than religion or political beliefs, they were seen as uniting people across the continent. The Danish critic Georg Brandes argued, for example, that advances in transportation, communication and printing, and the growth of translations, had opened up the various literatures of Europe to a ‘modern European sensibility’.¹⁶ The process did not have to mean the loss of nationality. But it did entail a greater openness on the part of each country, a recognition that any national culture is the result of a constant dialogue across state boundaries and of the assimilation of separate artistic traditions into a larger European world.

In his essay ‘The Crisis of the Mind’ (1919) Paul Valéry, the French poet, reflected on the nature of this European culture on the eve of the First World War:

In a book of that era – and not one of the most mediocre – we should have no trouble in finding: the influence of the Russian ballet, a touch of Pascal’s gloom, numerous impressions of the Goncourt type, something of Nietzsche, something of Rimbaud, certain effects due to a familiarity with painters, and sometimes the tone of a scientific publication … the whole flavoured with an indefinably British quality difficult to assess!

Valéry thought this complex fusion was ‘characteristic of the modern epoch’, by which he meant a ‘way of life’ as well as a time. Europe, he maintained, had reached the apogee of this ‘modernism’ in 1914, just before ‘the illusion of a European culture’ was then lost on the battlefields of Flanders and Poland.¹⁷

Paradoxically, it was in the post-war years – after that illusion had been shattered – that the ideal of a coherent European cultural identity really came into its own. For Europe’s intellectuals, the war was a catastrophe, unravelling the densely interwoven connections built up among Europe’s nations and threatening to destroy its cultural supremacy. Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918) was only one of many books predicting the demise of European civilization. To reverse its decline the ‘European project’ (as it then came into existence) needed an idea of Europe that upheld its special character and position in the world. There was a growing emphasis on European high culture as the source of this identity. Animated by nostalgic yearning for the internationalism of fin-de-siècle Europe, liberal thinkers recast Europe and its culture as a ‘shared inheritance’ based on ‘a desire for understanding and exchange’ between nations, in the words of Valéry; as a ‘spiritual unity’, as the sociologist Georg Simmel put it; and as a ‘supranational realm of humanism’, as Stefan Zweig, the Austrian Jewish writer, wrote in The World of Yesterday (1942). Zweig’s work was suffused with this nostalgic longing for the certainties of nineteenth-century Europe, not least because it was finished on the eve of the writer’s suicide, as the ‘illusion of a European culture’ collapsed once again.

‘How many changes you have witnessed in your life,’ Saint-Saëns wrote to Pauline Viardot on 19 December 1909:

The railways, steamships, telegraphs, gaslights, electric telegrams and lighting – you have seen them all come into existence; and now there are cars that move on their own, speaking telegraphs and aeroplanes … And how many changes in the field of art! You made your debut when Rossini, Bellini and others were at the height of their glory; you saw, after the brilliant reign of Meyerbeer, how – and from what fogs? – the art of Richard Wagner rose … and now the rise of Richard Strauss’s art, the precursor of the world’s end: it is the Antichrist in music. When Elektra* recognizes her brother, Orestes, three tonalities are heard simultaneously! The technique has been baptised, and named heterophony. There was no need for a new word: cacophony would have sufficed.¹⁸

Pauline did not altogether share Saint-Saëns’s mistrust of the modern movement in music. She had always been receptive to new forms of art. But she was, as he implied, a figure firmly rooted in the glorious achievements of the previous century. That is certainly how she was seen in the final years of her long life. She received many visitors – scholars, writers, composers and musicians – who asked her questions about all the people she had known. What could she tell them of Rossini, Gounod, Berlioz, Liszt or Meyerbeer – of Sand or Delacroix – all now long since dead? What had Chopin’s piano-playing sounded like? What was she prepared to say about Turgenev as a friend? Did she have letters they could see? What to her were memories of friendship, emotions, love, had become to a younger generation the documentary material of music, art and literary history.

There is no surviving evidence of Pauline’s art. We can never know what her singing sounded like. The phonograph arrived too late to record it. The earliest recording of the great bass Feodor Chaliapin dates from 1901; the tenor Ernest Caruso made his first recording in 1902. Perhaps the closest we can get to Pauline’s style of singing are the crackly recordings made in 1905 by Pauline’s former pupil Marianne Brandt, then aged sixty-three, whose young voice had reminded Turgenev of Viardot’s. The three songs she recorded on Pathé cylinders – Schumann’s ‘Frühlingsnacht’ (Spring Night), the drinking song from Lucrezia Borgia and Fidès’s aria ‘Ah mon fils’ from Le Prophète – had all been sung by Pauline many times.¹⁹

The phonograph was one of the many new inventions – along with talking films and the telegraphone (the first magnetic audio recorder) – displayed at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, whose main entrance on the place de la Concorde, a three-arched dome topped by a giant female figure representing Paris with her open arms, could be seen from the windows of Pauline’s apartment. The Exposition was the last of the great nineteenth-century exhibitions in Paris and was meant to be a synthesis of the achievements of the past one hundred years as well as an opening of the twentieth century. Modernity was the key theme. The first line of the Paris Metro was completed for the fair. Moving pavements carried visitors around the site at different speeds. People came with portable cameras. And inside the Grand Palais, the main exhibition hall in the Art Nouveau style, there were modern works of art – one by Gauguin, three by Cézanne, eight by Pissarro, twelve by Manet and fourteen by Monet – alongside those by David, Delacroix, Ingres and Meissonier to represent the glories of nineteenth-century French painting. Rodin had his own pavilion just outside the Exposition grounds, but unlike Courbet or Manet before him he also had the blessing of the city of Paris, which financed his exhibition of sculptures.

Entrance to the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900.

Pauline’s career had spanned a crucial period in the history of the music business. Cheap mass printing had permitted the dissemination of the music canon through sheet music. People came to concerts or the opera house with a detailed knowledge of the music, which they had learned by playing it themselves, either in arrangements or in the original. With the arrival of recorded music the canon of familiar classics became far more widely known, enjoyed by people who could not afford a piano. But those who went to public concerts were less likely to read music, to know these pieces from a score, or understand them in a way that had made the experience of listening to live music so precious and intense in the nineteenth century.

During the last years of her life, Pauline was increasingly confined to her apartment, where she was looked after by her former pupil Mathilde de Nogueiras. She was active to the end, composing music, teaching pupils, helping them to launch their singing careers by writing letters to her many contacts in the music world, despite the pain it must have caused her just to hold a pen, judging from her awkward handwriting.²⁰ She had terrible rheumatic pains in her fingers, hands and arms; she was practically blind, with cataracts in both her eyes; and her hearing became poor. ‘I have become frightened to go out,’ she confided to her diary in 1907.

I dare not cross the street. I have lost physical confidence. If I am asked a question, I take a long time to respond, as if I want it to pass through a filter first; often the question is repeated, because they think I have not understood. That troubles me. I have grown indifferent to many things. I rarely give my opinion, it does not seem worth the trouble. In general, I speak little, particularly with the family, I don’t know why. I often think they listen only from respect, but pay no heed to what I say.²¹

One thing she was not indifferent to was the arrival of Sergei Diaghilev and his saison russe in Paris that year. Diaghilev’s idea – to bring the arts of Russia to Europe – was one dear to Pauline’s heart. She had been promoting Russian music for the previous sixty years. The first season featured music by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, Borodin, Scriabin, Mussorgsky and Rachmaninov; it culminated in the sensation of Chaliapin’s performance in the title role of Boris Godunov, the first time Mussorgsky’s masterpiece had been performed outside Russia, at the Paris Opéra on 19 May 1908. The next year the Ballets Russes were launched with an opening production of Nikolai Tcherepnin’s Le Pavillon d’Armide at the Théâtre du Châtelet, followed by The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913) by Stravinsky. This was the point when Russia took its place right at the heart of Europe’s cosmopolitan culture, the moment when the influence of the Russian ballet became part of the complex fusion that defined any European work of art in the years before the First World War. Despite their Russian folk tale narratives, exotic stage-sets and costumes, all designed to appeal to the French, the Stravinsky ballets were in fact a synthesis of European elements, the music drawn as much from Debussy, Ravel and Fauré as from Russian folk song and its champions in the nationalist school. If the French saw the ballets as authentically ‘Russian’, the Russians thought they sounded French.²²

Diaghilev had close connections to Pauline. His father and stepmother had met her when they had visited Turgenev in Paris in the 1870s, while his aunt, the opera singer Alexandra Panaeva-Kartseva, had studied with Pauline on the advice of Turgenev. Diaghilev was keen to meet Pauline when he came to Paris in 1906 to launch an exhibition of modern Russian art. She had known Tchaikovsky, whom he idolized, and had good contacts among the city’s cultural élites, whose support he needed for his saisons russes. The meeting did not take place.²³ Diaghilev was soon immersed in the fashionable salons of Madame Melanie de Pourtalès, Countess Greffulhe and Misia Sert, who financed both his Russian concert seasons and the Ballets Russes. With such backing the ambitious impresario had no need to visit an old lady like Pauline. But everything he would achieve with the Ballets Russes in Paris was the fulfilment of the cultural ideals she had embodied all her life.

Pauline died on 18 May 1910. She fell asleep in an armchair and died, without waking, at three o’clock in the morning. According to Louise, who was with her, as Pauline slipped away she made a movement with her hands and appeared to be talking to people in her head. ‘Norma’ was the only word she said – the name of one of her most famous roles. The funeral took place two days later in the Basilica of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris. Saint-Saëns gave the main address. Fauré’s ‘Pie Jesu’ was sung by a soprano accompanied by César Franck on the Cavaillé-Coll organ, for which the church is famous.²⁴ It was a religious ceremony, conducted according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, a fact which would have shocked Pauline’s husband, a diehard atheist. But the gravestone over their two bodies, lying side by side in the cemetery at Montmartre, is devoid of any Christian sign.

* Much of the collection was sold by auction at the Hôtel Drouot on 28–29 January 1890 – perhaps a sign that Pauline needed cash, or perhaps that she decided to live without the memories these items meant for her. The sale catalogue included: a Louis XIV sofa and four chairs in blue velvet with ivory; a large Louis XIV wooden table with marble; Louis XIV-style consoles; candelabras in the Louis XIV style; tables, armchairs, sofas in the Louis XVI style; mirrors in the Louis XIII style; heavy window drapes in blue velvet; silk curtains in red and white stripes; bedroom furniture in a Chinese style; oriental carpets; Belgian tapestries; Venetian glass; Delft vases; an English billiard table; bronze sculptures representing hunting scenes; bronze and wooden busts; stained-glass windows; a screen of wood and glass made by Pauline; a Pleyel upright piano and an Érard grand piano; and a vintage wine collection with a thousand bottles, dating back to the 1870s (BMO, LA-VIARDOT PAULINE-5).

* In 1894, a Jewish army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was unjustly convicted of espionage, sentenced to life imprisonment, and held on Devil’s Island until 1899, when he was brought back to France and put on trial again after the appearance of new evidence – some of which confirmed his innocence, while other documents were fabricated by the army to frame him. The court found Dreyfus guilty, once more sentenced him to ten years of imprisonment, but pardoned him. In 1906, he was exonerated and reinstated in the French army, where he served in the First World War.

* Saint-Saëns is referring to the opera Elektra, first performed in Dresden in 1909.